I learned sporadically: I fooled around in Scheme and Java when I was a kid, and used MATLAB as a student doing research, and learned the modicum of Unix that everybody in a math department knows, but it didn't really stick. Until recently, when I realized that everything I care about scientifically needs a good programmer to implement it. So I started a learning project and quickly discovered that programming is not hard. I wish someone had told me this a long time ago. Programming is just, in essence, writing extremely clearly.
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I learned sporadically: I fooled around in Scheme and Java when I was a kid, and used MATLAB as a student doing research, and learned the modicum of Unix that everybody in a math department knows, but it didn't really stick. Until recently, when I realized that everything I care about scientifically needs a good programmer to implement it. So I started a learning project and quickly discovered that programming is not hard. I wish someone had told me this a long time ago. Programming is just, in essence, writing extremely clearly.